Monday, October 24, 2005

Tourney Results

The problem was that it started at 5am Monday morning, here in Tokyo. I work early shifts, so I have to get ready for work about 6:30am. After my abysmal showing in the WWdN tourney, where I basically immediately pissed myself, tripped over my own shoelaces turning to flee and impaled myself on an exposed 2 foot spike wrapped in barbed wire, I figured that I might very well be knocked out pretty early in this tourney too. If I could last an hour or two and not be dead, I would call it a moral victory.

I actually did quite well by these standards. We three live players at the table stole blinds from the Sitting Outers for 10-15 minutes until a couple of them showed up and we started playing seriously. I played fairly solidly, I thought, and wasn't worried or confused about everyone's play (Thank you, Dan Harrington). I flopped the nut heart flush at one point, slowplayed it and let an aggressive player go all in, then took his stack and sent him home. Kept pressing my edge and found myself the second place table chip leader with about 4,000 in chips at the first break, 6am. First had about 6K, the others 1500-3000, so I felt pretty good.

At the 6am break, about 300 of the 1400+ entries had busted out, so it was clear that this was going to be many more hours of play, so I decided to finish up, blow off my chips, and go to work at my normal hour. I announced to the table that I would be raising every hand preflop by $500, regardless of what I had, so everyone should be aware. I figured this would be less annoying to other players than setting myself Away and being slowly blinded out, but at least a couple people on the table didn't seem to like the idea. One of them said, disapprovingly it seemed to me, "One day you will learn what karma is." I still don't know what the fuck that is supposed to mean. So I just responded, "Yeah, maybe one day."

I guess karma was at play after all, since I was shifted to another table almost immediately after we came back from break, and the disapprovers at my previous table didn't have to deal with my Raise Every Hand plan. I made my announcement to the new table and they were much more enthusiastic about adding $500 of basically dead money to every pot, so I did as I planned. I put at least $500 into every pot, lost them all, and spread my $4K around several of the the remaining players who seemed to enjoy it.

I finished up in the 900s, I think it was, which was not bad. I felt like I was doing well and could easily have lasted another hour or two, but you know... real job comes first. It was good fun, and I felt good about my play, so color me a winner. The carribean can wait until next time.

2 comments:

Yeah, I would guess somewhere around 25-35% no-shows! Seemed awful high to me, but I guess if it's free then a lot of folks will sign up and not sweat it if they happen to be busy that day.

It's nice when the live players at the table can agree to take turns stealing blinds from the away players. It spreads the money more evenly, and works towards knocking out absent players in hopes that they'll be replaced with live ones.

About Me

An American expat, I've lived and worked in Tokyo for coming up on ten years. I picked up poker after downloading an ep of Celebrity Poker Showdown on a lark, and since then it's been an on-again, off-again struggle to learn the game, not suck, and find places to play.